ETHEL CARRICK FOX

Private collection, Melbourne

Good condition. Some visible but stable drying cracks in mid-ground. Slight surface dirt, consistent with the works age. UV inspection shows a small patch of flaring, possibly re-touching to the sky in the centre of the picture.
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When the Australian expatriate Emanuel Phillips Fox married the young English painter Ethel Carrick in the spring of 1905, the young artist couple relocated immediately to Paris, to the acknowledged centre of French Impressionism. It was not until two years later that Fox and 'his elaborately aesthetic missus' enjoyed a 'honeymoon' vacation, travelling on something of a busman's holiday to picturesque, art history freighted Venice. The present work was probably painted on the spot, and was shown at the Salon d'Automne later that year.

For Carrick Fox market scenes, with their bustle and colour, provided the ideal subject for her rapid, high-key impressionist style. Indeed, in a review of 1908, The Age noted that 'her strength is most felt in the depiction of some corner of a market place in one of the old continental towns, with its profusion of colour, and where figures are introduced as notes of orange or purple, and to give movement to a busy scene...'  Flowers added still further brightness, and Carrick Fox showed flower market scenes at the Salon d'Automne and the Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts (the New Salon) in 1907, 1910, 1927, 1928 and 1932.

The present work is typical of the artist's early style, influenced as much by her husband as by her Slade School teachers Frederick Brown and Henry Tonks: a fluent (second generation) impressionist. It is an art of contrasts: between creamy brightness and lavender-grey shadow, between the dark and deftly-captured silhouette stances of the market women and the small riot of colour - Venetian reds and pinks - in the blossoms on the right.